Choosing a Language

"I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat."
-- Winston Churchill

Most American children do not study a second language until high school, if then. (*) This means that they are capable of making a rational choice -- younger children are likely either to choose on a whim or to be influenced by external factors (typically parents).

Suppose you are interested in learning another language (or you are required to do so). Assuming you have a choice of languages, how should you choose which one to study? The most common argument you will hear is that you should choose a language which many other people speak, since you are more likely to have occasion to use it. This is certainly a valid factor to consider, but it is far from being the only one. Here are some others:

Literature. Spanish may be the most frequently spoken language in the US besides English, but Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and many other languages have significant bodies of poetry, drama, fiction, and philosophy.

Science. English is the most commonly used language in science these days, but much important work is and has been done in other languages, especially German and Russian, in areas such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, linguistics, psychology, and medicine.

Music. Italian is the universal language of music, but French and German are also common in vocal music.

International relations. If you plan a career in government, business, or the military, it may be useful to learn the languages of major geopolitical powers or hot spots -- Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, etc.

Savoir-faire. Impress your date by taking her to a fancy restaurant and conversing with the maître d'hotel and the sommelier in French as you order hors d'oeuvres. Provide literal translations of the dishes on a Chinese menu. Discuss the finer points of Italian opera, quoting liberally from the libretto.

Heritage. Are your grandparents Irish, Ibo, Inuit? Maybe you would like to talk to them in their native language and help keep their history and oral traditions alive, or visit the ancestral country, or read the sacred texts of their religion.

Ease of learning. Rigorous statistics on this subject are hard to find. Spanish has a reputation for being easy, but that is mainly due to its phonetic spelling. French and German have more common vocabulary with English. Non-Indo-European languages such as Arabic or Swahili are much more difficult for an English speaker to learn. Non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese and Japanese are very difficult to learn to read and write.

Here are some observations by language teachers:
Which Language? French, German, Spanish, or Latin?
FAQ: Which Foreign Language?

Aesthetics. Some languages just sound nicer than others. Opinions vary, of course, but it seems to me that languages with many liquid sounds (Spanish, French, Italian, Polynesian) are more mellifluous than languages with many stops and harsh gutturals (German, Czech, Hebrew, Russian), and more musical than languages where pitch is semantically significant (Chinese). Some alphabets are visually fascinating (Georgian, Phags-pa, Kannada, Lontara, and of course Glagolitic).

Above all, unless you have an immediately practical reason to do otherwise, you should choose a language that appeals to you -- then you'll be motivated to study and practice more.

* According to a 1995 report by the Center for Applied Linguistics, only about 6% of primary-school students study any foreign language, and 39% of high-school students. A recent survey indicates that the number of public elementary schools teaching foreign languages actually declined from 1997 to 2008, to 15%.